blog.8-p.info

I still read Hacker News. This week I found Rediscovering the Small Web there. The post itself is something I can relate to. And then on the HN thread, I found Fraidycat.

Fraidycat is a small RSS/Atom reader with steroids. As an old Japanese internet geek, it reminds me WWWC and antennas. Those are pre-RSS, internet update “checkers”. Antennas are also working as a blogroll before blogging. Its history is fascinating and I’d write more about that, but not this time.

Now I’m trying Fraidycat on Firefox. I like it so far.

• It is designed to be not too fast. I can read (or skip) posts by grasping the titles first. I can let its cralwer to check some feeds less frequently.
• By HTML scraping, it works as a Twitter client and supports some popular websites that have no RSS/Atom feeds.
• All sites only have 2 lines, no matter how frequently people update. There is no “Twitterstorm” problem.
• The small sparklines, the cat, and the colors. It has some “why the lucky stiff” feeling.

I’ve been using Feedly after Google Reader’s shutdown. Before that, I was using livedoor Reader and Bloglines. I may switch from Feedly to Fraidycat.

2021-01-30

I ended up back to Feedly.

Despite the fact that this Hugo instance has been around for 3 years, I’ve never added tags on my posts. It is bit awkward to manually add “Go” when a post itself contains “Go”.

But, well, I’ve changed my mind.

Hugo’s Taxonomies page explains the overall and Taxonomy Templates page describes the way to show taxonomies in templates. I also added a bit of CSS to make it looks nice. I still cannot write Flexbox without googling. A Complete Guide to Flexbox is my go-to.

The only downside would be losing “³⁄₁₀₀”-style count-up. I’m going to do that every 10 posts or so.

BCC (BPF Compiler Collection) has a bunch of “tools” (small Python scripts) that utilizes BPF. Because of the fact that BPF can trace the entire Linux kernel, these tools are useful when you cannot target a specific process easily. In my mind, they are like top or ps, rather than strace.

opensnoop

opensnoop traces all open() syscalls.

Let’s say, you know that some stats are coming from /proc filesystem, but your daemon doesn’t report the stats, and the daemon has multiple processes. opensnoop is the tool you want.

killsnoop

killsnoop traces all kill() syscalls.

Let’s say your process is killed by someone mysteriously and strace shows the process is only doing ordinary stuff. killsnoop is the tool you want.

I’ve found 100 Days to Offload via Blogging is not dead.

#100DaysToOffload is a simple concept that Kev Quirk thought of one day. The rationale behind the whole thing is to challenge people to publish 100 posts on their personal blog in a year. That’s approximately 1 post every 3.5 days.

I do like the idea! So, I’m going to start the challenge from today.

For me, having 100 posts in a year is definitely a stretch goal. I used to write a lot more often, but I had neither kids nor a full-time job at that time. And even that days, I rarely had 100 posts in a year.

On the other hand, my day job is mostly writing open-source software. It is possible to write about what I did. For example, I cherry-picked Maksym’s fix on containerd from master to release/1.3 and the PR has been merged today. Well, this one may not be that interesting, since I literally did git cherry-pick three times and that’s all.

Anyway I will write more often here! Do or do not. There is no try.

I recently know Gemini and a renaissance of Gopher.

Gemini is a new, collaboratively designed internet protocol, which explores the space inbetween gopher and the web, striving to address (perceived) limitations of one while avoiding the (undeniable) pitfalls of the other.

Gemini is a pretty simple network protocol and a hypertext format (text/gemini). Unlike IPFS, Gemini is not for building a decentralized web.

I do like the simplicity. HTTP and HTML are getting pretty complicated. HTTP/3 is probably a big engineering win that allows us to send more bytes efficiently, but the overall complexity makes me down. Along with the complexity of HTML + CSS + JavaScript, as Drew DeVault wrote, it is impossible to build a new web browser.

Gemini is first proposed in solderpunk’s phlog. This link may not work for you since it is in gopher://. Yes, that Gopher protocol. There is a huge Gopher community out there in 2020. Vice’s Motherboard was covering the scene in 2017.

Gopher and pubnix (public unix) servers and the whole phlogsphere remind me the early blogosphere. Phlogs often have links to other phlogs. It still has “everyone knows each other” feeling.